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This Week in Brains, Dating The Voynich, Parrots And Left Hands, A Gas Influencing Orbit, Bubbles Of Clay, Deserts And Jumping Genes, Justin Has Snake Legs, And Much More!
Show Notes:
Some of the stories we discussed…
Brains-
Love and the brain
Death, decapitation, and consciousness
What’s the Frequency, Kenneth? (Thanks, Monkey)
Thinking cap continues to get news…
The Voynich Manuscript Gets Dated!
Left-handed parrots (Thanks, Pamela)
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Historic methane levels influenced by Earth’s orbit (Thanks, Pamela)
Genes-
Gene promoters found in DNA deserts
Horizontal jumpers found in fungus (Thanks, Dale)
Jumping genes prevalent in people… (Thanks, Ed Dyer)
Snakes had legs?
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I’m an occasional listener and I appreciate the mix of humor and education.
I have a comment on the story about clay bubbles. This seems like an unlikely scenario for the development of first life.
The clay shell might act as a selective membrane – letting small molecules in and keeping macromolecules from leaving – but this is nothing like the selective process in modern cells. Size isn’t the most important factor – but the nature of the chemicals let in or out. Cells must take in nutrients and excrete waste.
Even if all the right ingredients were selectively let inside the clay membrane for some sort of self-reproducing cellular system – how would this system escape the clay membrane to begin the spread of life?
Or, once the clay membrane eventually broke or dissolved, how would the cellular system survive without its protective cell wall? It would have had to evolve its own cell wall between the time the clay bubble formed and when it dissolved. I don’t know how long this would have been, but doubtfully long enough for the evolution of a host of necessary cellular components for life outside of the bubble – especially considering that it took 20 years of guided evolution for Lenski’s bacteria to gain the most significant evoultionary adaptation seen in the lab.